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The Steam Hardware & Software Survey now offers the June results showing the hardware being used to play games on Valve's service (thanks VG247). These results reflect jump in the use of newer hardware, and they kick off with the following explanation of how this is in part because they've addressed a bug in the system:

There was a bug introduced into Steam's survey code several months ago that caused a bias toward older systems. Specifically, only systems that had run the survey prior to the introduction of the bug would be asked to run the survey again. This caused brand new systems to never run the survey. In March 2012, we caught the bug, causing the survey to be run on a large number of new computers, thus giving us a more accurate survey and causing some of the numbers to vary more than they normally would month-to-month. Some of the most interesting changes revealed by this correction were increased OS share of Windows 7 (as Vista fell below XP), the rise of Intel as a graphics provider and the overall diversification of Steam worldwide (as seen in the increase of non-English language usage, particularly Russian).

I have a black edition dual core AMD. It will unlock from 2 to 4 cores (all stable). In dual core it will OC from 3.1 to 3.7 with a minor voltage increase. In quad core I can OC to 3.2 only. Rest of my system is pretty frugal, ATI 6850 (OC a bit), 8gb RAM running at the max my mobo will - only 1600 (9-9-9) but the prize is the SSD

Civ5, SOTS2 and shogun 2 are the biggest eaters of CPU that I have (looking at perfmon in the other monitor) and I still get a better "turn by turn" performance in dual core OC with SSD than quad core without SSD (I use steammover)

Sure if I have bags-O-money(tm) then i'd love a better system but until then its cheapy mc cheap cheap for me.

My claim to fame is that I was one of the people who could luckily skew the results when I ran steam one day on a multi cpu new server (I was curious ok!)

Its not the cough that carries you off but the coffin they carry you off in.